CCC and PCC Urgent and Surge Community Swabbing Service for Covid-19

Background

National Approach to Test and Trace

• The Government launched the NHS Test and Trace Service on 28th May 2020. This national service is designed to control the virus and enable people to live a safer and more normal life. The overarching guiding principles being Test; Trace; Contain; Enable.
• The NHS Test and Trace Service will work as a proposed 3 tier system; Tier 1 is of relevance for the local testing system
• Tier 1 will be a regionalised network, including sub-regional and localised delivery providing contact tracing, consequence management and support in relation to complex settings, cohorts and individuals / households.
• Local planning and response will be the key to allowing the national service to work effectively at large scale.
• Local outbreak control plans centring on 7 key themes will be developed; and key theme 3 is identified as 'local testing capacity'
• The local testing service will need to ensure a swift response that is accessible to the local population (defining how to prioritise and manage deployment)
• A key consideration will be the ability of the local testing system to be able to respond swiftly once a complex cluster or setting has been identified through the national NHS Test and Trace initiative or through any other national or local stakeholders; e.g. East of England PHE Centre

Aims and Objectives

• The objective is to ensure that swift and effective local provision of community swabbing is always available to support the multiagency SARS-CoV-2 outbreak response in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.
• The aim will be to build on existing commissioned services (eg: School Nursing, District Nursing) in the creation of the systems and extra capacity required to achieve the objective above.